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Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Playin' Chess

Developing Robots From LEGO.

Years of chocolate abuse, cartoon network marathons and STAR WARS kit-sets are finally paying off; I always told my old man my early twenties were being spent productively.

Step 1. Designing a new chess piece to fit into the existing game.
Our Chess piece to begin with was 'the Beggar', a filthy little obstacle piece that erratically moved around the board getting in the players way. more of an obstacle- an uncontrolled unit on the board.

Working within the constraints we couldn't use this idea (The restrictions involving a minimum movement space of three squares, and the theme of a homeless decrepit hungry old pauper stumbling around the board). For the sake of the character, and consistent storytelling, we changed to a much more nimble and vicious avatar-'The Thief'. This piece moves around the center of the board in a square robbing surrounding pieces of their equipment and ipods, thereby disabling them for a turn.

The story telling aspect was a new spin on what i had thought of as a purely aesthetic and functional design brief. But the more I thought about the relevance of these details, and the more the project develops, the more comfortable I feel. I guess that's why we're being pushed to develop back stories and bio's for inanimate chess pieces, because they do represent something flesh and blood (bar the rook maybe). Something that has the potential to tell a story of its own (imagine the tale of the powerful but burdened king as the turmoil of a game of chess unfolds. Its our job as the creative minds driving a creative industry to breathe life into the things we work with. otherwise maybe we should be doing another course of tertiary education instead, like business (number-crunching dweebs). I'm glad BCT has made me think like this in the first week.